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| Praise and a troubled Ryan Gosling on a poster for Henry Bean's The Believer |
QUICK REVIEW:
The Believer is about a Jewish neo-Nazi, who agitates with great eloquence and persuasion about different things and contributes to violence, but who at the same time hasn't totally abandoned his religion.
This is an intellectually hard-pumped film about racism, antisemitism, the Holocaust and Judaism seen through a profoundly torn, confused, volatile and self-loathing protagonist. Ryan Gosling (Lost River (2014), writer-producer-director) is frighteningly convincing in that paradoxical role, which is based on a real man, who was a member of the American Nazi Party and the United Klans of America, until a journalist from the New York Times outed his secret, Jewish personality, and he committed suicide. This happened in 1965.
The Believer is a strong film, thought-provoking and provoking altogether. It is a strange coincidence that it came out in 2001, about 6 months before a band of fanatically crazed believers (of a different religion and creeds, yes, but still very comparable to Gosling's character in The Believer) attacked the US, and flung the world into the decade-long War on Terror.
The Believer's director Henry Bean, who is Jewish himself, has only directed one other film, Noise (2007), and has written quite a few screenplays for other directors for films like Basic Instinct 2 (2006).
Watch the trailer here
Budget: 1.5 mil. $
Box office: 0.4 mil. $
= Big flop
What do you think of The Believer?
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